Google Launches App Engine SDK 1.4

With the new Google App Engine SDK 1.4, developers gain several new features, including the lifting of the 1MB size limit on many APIs.

Google has announced a new version of the Software Development Kit for its App Engine cloud platform, Google App Engine 1.4.SDK.
Google officials said this is the largest release of the year for the App Engine SDK, which includes new features such as the Channel API. The Channel API is a bi-directional channel for communicating directly with user browsers. This service lets applications push notifications directly to browsers and eliminates the need for polling.

In addition, App Engine SDK 1.4 also includes the new Always On feature, which enables developers to reserve three instances of their applications to run at all times regardless of load. And for $9 a month, Google will maintain three independent replicas of a developer's applications so that even applications with low or variable amounts of traffic can be confident that there are active instances at all times, the company said.

Other new features include that Warm Up Requests are now used whenever possible to load new instances of a developer's application beforeApp Engine sends instances user traffic. This helps hide the impact of loading requests on the developer's application's performance.
In addition, there is no more 30-second limit for background work. With this release, Google has significantly raised this limit for offline requests from Task Queue and Cron so that developers can now run for up to 10 minutes without interruption.
Moreover, Google has increased API call size limits. A new API architecture enables Google to start lifting the 1MB size limits on many of the App Engine APIs. The following APIs have been changed:

Response size limits for URLFetch have been raised from 1MB to 32MB.

Memcache batch get/put can now also do up to 32MB requests.

Image API requests and response size limits have been raised from 1MB to 32MB.

Mail API outgoing attachments have been increased from 1MB to 10MB.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.